To make this article less preachy, here's a picture of a cat I drew. Meow.

Taking a step backwards is rarely a helpful thing in life. Short of walking in on your mum in the shower and successfully completing a moonwalk its nigh on foolish. Taking a step back in the street can mean walking back into the road, a lamp post, or a vein throbbingly muscular pedestrian who doesn't take kindly to people treading on his pinkies.

Sarah "I can see Russia from my house" Palin is in every sense a step backwards. She represents the anti-health care, anti-gay, pro-life, anti-stem cell research, pro-death penalty, oil-loving Bush policy-supporting deep-seated Republican cretin the U.S. doesn't need. This is a woman that believes schoolchildren should ignore all scientific evidence and rigour and be taught that the world was created by a fuzzy old man in the sky with an epic beard.

To run for presidency its expected the candidates will undertake three tasks in preparation. The first is the pretty standard task of building a campaign team, which she has done. The second is the setting up of a fundraising machine, also completed. And the third is a campaign visit to Iowa. A visit she's making this coming friday. Iowa is traditionally seen in iMerica as the place where election campaigns are born, and a big player in shaping the result later on. This is worrying.

Should Obama fail to make it to his second term (a bad result in the primarys could leave his government impotent and flaccid, like the unfortunate victim of a viagra-blue smartie switcheroo) and should the rumours prove true, Sarah "slanderous middle name" Palin could find her way into the White House. The political equivalent of shooting the man who's almost finished rolling a boulder to the top of a mountain with his nose, only to let it roll back to the bottom again, and all the while scolding it for reforming the health care system. Within 3 months of her taking office we'd all be dead, or walking around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, malformed and driven insane by the fallout of nuclear warfare, devouring anyone we came across as the sound of silence slowly engulfs what little remains. And that's not just hysterical opinion, that's fact!

Well, ok, it is hysterical opinion. But Palin sucks, don't let this happen America, you were just starting to look cool again.